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Next week the FCC is slated to vote on the second iteration of Chairman Wheeler’s proposed broadband privacy rules. Of course, as has become all too common, none of us outside the Commission has actually seen the proposal. But earlier this month Chairman Wheeler released a Fact Sheet that suggests some of the ways it would update the rules he initially proposed.

According to the Fact Sheet, the new proposed rules are

designed to evolve with changing technologies and encourage innovation, and are in harmony with other key privacy frameworks and principles — including those outlined by the Federal Trade Commission and the Administration’s Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights.

Unfortunately, the Chairman’s proposal appears to fall short of the mark on both counts.

As I discuss in detail in a letter filed with the Commission yesterday, despite the Chairman’s rhetoric, the rules described in the Fact Sheet fail to align with the FTC’s approach to privacy regulation embodied in its 2012 Privacy Report in at least two key ways:

First, the Fact Sheet significantly expands the scope of information that would be considered “sensitive” beyond that contemplated by the FTC. That, in turn, would impose onerous and unnecessary consumer consent obligations on commonplace uses of data, undermining consumer welfare, depriving consumers of information and access to new products and services, and restricting competition.

Second, unlike the FTC’s framework, the proposal described by the Fact Sheet ignores the crucial role of “context” in determining the appropriate level of consumer choice before affected companies may use consumer data. Instead, the Fact Sheet takes a rigid, acontextual approach that would stifle innovation and harm consumers.

The FTC’s privacy guidance is, in its design at least, appropriately flexible, aimed at balancing the immense benefits of information flows with sensible consumer protections. Thus it eschews an “inflexible list of specific practices” that would automatically trigger onerous consent obligations and “risk[] undermining companies’ incentives to innovate and develop new products and services….”

Under the FTC’s regime, depending on the context in which it is used (on which see the next section, below), the sensitivity of data delineates the difference between data uses that require “express affirmative” (opt-in) consent and those that do not (requiring only “other protections” short of opt-in consent — e.g., opt-out).

Because the distinction is so important — because opt-in consent is much more likely to staunch data flows — the FTC endeavors to provide guidance as to what data should be considered sensitive, and to cabin the scope of activities requiring opt-in consent. Thus, the FTC explains that “information about children, financial and health information, Social Security numbers, and precise geolocation data [should be treated as] sensitive.” But beyond those instances, the FTC doesn’t consider any other type of data as inherently sensitive.

By contrast, and without explanation, Chairman Wheeler’s Fact Sheet significantly expands what constitutes “sensitive” information requiring “opt-in” consent by adding “web browsing history,” “app usage history,” and “the content of communications” to the list of categories of data deemed sensitive in all cases.

By treating some of the most common and important categories of data as always “sensitive,” and by making the sensitivity of data the sole determinant for opt-in consent, the Chairman’s proposal would make it almost impossible for ISPs to make routine (to say nothing of innovative), appropriate, and productive uses of data comparable to those undertaken by virtually every major Internet company. This goes well beyond anything contemplated by the FTC — with no evidence of any corresponding benefit to consumers and with obvious harm to competition, innovation, and the overall economy online.

And because the Chairman’s proposal would impose these inappropriate and costly restrictions only on ISPs, it would create a barrier to competition by ISPs in other platform markets, without offering a defensible consumer protection rationale to justify either the disparate treatment or the restriction on competition.

“Opt-in” offers no greater privacy protection than allowing consumers to “opt-out”…, yet it imposes significantly higher costs on consumers, businesses, and the economy.

Not surprisingly, these costs fall disproportionately on the relatively poor and the less technology-literate. In the former case, opt-in requirements may deter companies from offering services at all, even to people who would make a very different trade-off between privacy and monetary price. In the latter case, because an initial decision to opt-in must be taken in relative ignorance, users without much experience to guide their decisions will face effectively higher decision-making costs than more knowledgeable users.

The Chairman’s proposal ignores the central role of context in the FTC’s privacy framework

In part for these reasons, central to the FTC’s more flexible framework is the establishment of a sort of “safe harbor” for data uses where the benefits clearly exceed the costs and consumer consent may be inferred:

Companies do not need to provide choice before collecting and using consumer data for practices that are consistent with the context of the transaction or the company’s relationship with the consumer….

Thus for many straightforward uses of data, the “context of the transaction,” not the asserted “sensitivity” of the underlying data, is the threshold question in evaluating the need for consumer choice in the FTC’s framework.

Chairman Wheeler’s Fact Sheet, by contrast, ignores this central role of context in its analysis. Instead, it focuses solely on data sensitivity, claiming that doing so is “in line with customer expectations.”

Rather than relying solely upon the inherently subjective test of consumer expectations, the… standard focuses on more objective factors related to the consumer’s relationship with a business.

And while everyone agrees that sensitivity is a key part of pegging privacy regulation to actual consumer and corporate relationships, the FTC also recognizes that the importance of the sensitivity of the underlying data varies with the context in which it is used. Or, in the words of the White House’s 2012 Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World Report (introducing its Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights), “[c]ontext should shape the balance and relative emphasis of particular principles” guiding the regulation of privacy.

By contrast, Chairman Wheeler’s “sensitivity-determines-consumer-expectations” framing is a transparent attempt to claim fealty to the FTC’s (and the Administration’s) privacy standards while actually implementing a privacy regime that is flatly inconsistent with them.

The FTC’s approach isn’t perfect, but that’s no excuse to double down on its failings

The FTC’s privacy guidance, and even more so its privacy enforcement practices under Section 5, are far from perfect. The FTC should be commended for its acknowledgement that consumers’ privacy preferences and companies’ uses of data will change over time, and that there are trade-offs inherent in imposing any constraints on the flow of information. But even the FTC fails to actually assess the magnitude of the costs and benefits of, and the deep complexities involved in, the trade-off, and puts an unjustified thumb on the scale in favor of limiting data use.

But that’s no excuse for Chairman Wheeler to ignore what the FTC gets right, and to double down on its failings. Based on the Fact Sheet (and the initial NPRM), it’s a virtual certainty that the Chairman’s proposal doesn’t heed the FTC’s refreshing call for humility and flexibility regarding the application of privacy rules to ISPs (and other Internet platforms):

These are complex and rapidly evolving areas, and more work should be done to learn about the practices of all large platform providers, their technical capabilities with respect to consumer data, and their current and expected uses of such data.

The rhetoric of the Chairman’s Fact Sheet is correct: the FCC should in fact conform its approach to privacy to the framework established by the FTC. Unfortunately, the reality of the Fact Sheet simply doesn’t comport with its rhetoric.

As the FCC’s vote on the Chairman’s proposal rapidly nears, and in light of its significant defects, we can only hope that the rest of the Commission refrains from reflexively adopting the proposed regime, and works to ensure that these problematic deviations from the FTC’s framework are addressed before moving forward.

Brand drug manufacturers are no strangers to antitrust accusations when it comes to their complicated relationship with generic competitors — most obviously with respect to reverse payment settlements. But the massive and massively complex regulatory scheme under which drugs are regulated has provided other opportunities for regulatory legerdemain with potentially anticompetitive effect, as well.

In particular, some FTC Commissioners have raised concerns that brand drug companies have been taking advantage of an FDA drug safety program — the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies program, or “REMS” — to delay or prevent generic entry.

Drugs subject to a REMS restricted distribution program are difficult to obtain through market channels and not otherwise readily available, even for would-be generic manufacturers that need samples in order to perform the tests required to receive FDA approval to market their products. REMS allows (requires, in fact) brand manufacturers to restrict the distribution of certain drugs that present safety or abuse risks, creating an opportunity for branded drug manufacturers to take advantage of imprecise regulatory requirements by inappropriately limiting access by generic manufacturers.

The FTC has not (yet) brought an enforcement action, but it has opened several investigations, and filed an amicus brief in a private-party litigation. Generic drug companies have filed several antitrust claims against branded drug companies and raised concerns with the FDA.

The problem, however, is that even if these companies are using REMS to delay generics, such a practice makes for a terrible antitrust case. Not only does the existence of a regulatory scheme arguably set Trinko squarely in the way of a successful antitrust case, but the sort of refusal to deal claims at issue here (as in Trinko) are rightly difficult to win because, as the DOJ’s Section 2 Report notes, “there likely are few circumstances where forced sharing would help consumers in the long run.”

But just because there isn’t a viable antitrust case doesn’t mean there isn’t still a competition problem. But in this case, it’s a problem of regulatory failure. Companies rationally take advantage of poorly written federal laws and regulations in order to tilt the market to their own advantage. It’s no less problematic for the market, but its solution is much more straightforward, if politically more difficult.

Thus it’s heartening to see that Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), along with three of his colleagues (Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)), has proposed a novel but efficient way to correct these bureaucracy-generated distortions in the pharmaceutical market without resorting to the “blunt instrument” of antitrust law. As the bill notes:

While the antitrust laws may address actions by license holders who impede the prompt negotiation and development on commercially reasonable terms of a single, shared system of elements to assure safe use, a more tailored legal pathway would help ensure that license holders negotiate such agreements in good faith and in a timely manner, facilitating competition in the marketplace for drugs and biological products.

The legislative solution put forward by the Creating and Restoring Equal Access to Equivalent Samples (CREATES) Act of 2016 targets the right culprit: the poor regulatory drafting that permits possibly anticompetitive conduct to take place. Moreover, the bill refrains from creating a per se rule, instead implementing several features that should still enable brand manufacturers to legitimately restrict access to drug samples when appropriate.

In essence, Senator Lee’s bill introduces a third party (in this case, the Secretary of Health and Human Services) who is capable of determining whether an eligible generic manufacturer is able to comply with REMS restrictions — thus bypassing any bias on the part of the brand manufacturer. Where the Secretary determines that a generic firm meets the REMS requirements, the bill also creates a narrow cause of action for this narrow class of plaintiffs, allowing suits against certain brand manufacturers who — despite the prohibition on using REMS to delay generics — nevertheless misuse the process to delay competitive entry.

Background on REMS

The REMS program was introduced as part of the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007 (FDAAA). Following the withdrawal of Vioxx, an arthritis pain reliever, from the market because of a post-approval linkage of the drug to heart attacks, the FDA was under considerable fire, and there was a serious risk that fewer and fewer net beneficial drugs would be approved. The REMS program was introduced by Congress as a mechanism to ensure that society could reap the benefits from particularly risky drugs and biologics — rather than the FDA preventing them from entering the market at all. It accomplishes this by ensuring (among other things) that brands and generics adopt appropriate safety protocols for distribution and use of drugs — particularly when a drug has the potential to cause serious side effects, or has an unusually high abuse profile.

The FDA-determined REMS protocols can range from the simple (e.g., requiring a medication guide or a package insert about potential risks) to the more burdensome (including restrictions on a drug’s sale and distribution, or what the FDA calls “Elements to Assure Safe Use” (“ETASU”)). Most relevant here, the REMS process seems to allow brands considerable leeway to determine whether generic manufacturers are compliant or able to comply with ETASUs. Given this discretion, it is no surprise that brand manufacturers may be tempted to block competition by citing “safety concerns.”

Although the FDA specifically forbids the use of REMS to block lower-cost, generic alternatives from entering the market (of course), almost immediately following the law’s enactment, certain less-scrupulous branded pharmaceutical companies began using REMS for just that purpose (also, of course).

REMS abuse

To enter into pharmaceutical markets that no longer have any underlying IP protections, manufactures must submit to the FDA an Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA) for a generic, or an Abbreviated Biologic License Application (ABLA) for a biosimilar, of the brand drug. The purpose is to prove to the FDA that the competing product is as safe and effective as the branded reference product. In order to perform the testing sufficient to prove efficacy and safety, generic and biosimilar drug manufacturers must acquire a sample (many samples, in fact) of the reference product they are trying to replicate.

For the narrow class of dangerous or highly abused drugs, generic manufacturers are forced to comply with any REMS restrictions placed upon the brand manufacturer — even when the terms require the brand manufacturer to tightly control the distribution of its product.

And therein lies the problem. Because the brand manufacturer controls access to its products, it can refuse to provide the needed samples, using REMS as an excuse. In theory, it may be true in certain cases that a brand manufacturer is justified in refusing to distribute samples of its product, of course; some would-be generic manufacturers certainly may not meet the requisite standards for safety and security.

But in practice it turns out that most of the (known) examples of brands refusing to provide samples happen across the board — they preclude essentially all generic competition, not just the few firms that might have insufficient safeguards. It’s extremely difficult to justify such refusals on the basis of a generic manufacturer’s suitability when all would-be generic competitors are denied access, including well-established, high-quality manufacturers.

But, for a few brand manufacturers, at least, that seems to be how the REMS program is implemented. Thus, for example, Jon Haas, director of patient access at Turing Pharmaceuticals, referred to the practice of denying generics samples this way:

Most likely I would block that purchase… We spent a lot of money for this drug. We would like to do our best to avoid generic competition. It’s inevitable. They seem to figure out a way [to make generics], no matter what. But I’m certainly not going to make it easier for them. We’re spending millions and millions in research to find a better Daraprim, if you will.

As currently drafted, the REMS program gives branded manufacturers the ability to limit competition by stringing along negotiations for product samples for months, if not years. Although access to a few samples for testing is seemingly such a small, trivial thing, the ability to block this access allows a brand manufacturer to limit competition (at least from bioequivalent and generic drugs; obviously competition between competing branded drugs remains).

And even if a generic competitor manages to get ahold of samples, the law creates an additional wrinkle by imposing a requirement that brand and generic manufacturers enter into a single shared REMS plan for bioequivalent and generic drugs. But negotiating the particulars of the single, shared program can drag on for years. Consequently, even when a generic manufacturer has received the necessary samples, performed the requisite testing, and been approved by the FDA to sell a competing drug, it still may effectively be barred from entering the marketplace because of REMS.

The number of drugs covered by REMS is small: fewer than 100 in a universe of several thousand FDA-approved drugs. And the number of these alleged to be subject to abuse is much smaller still. Nonetheless, abuse of this regulation by certain brand manufacturers has likely limited competition and increased prices.

Antitrust is not the answer

Whether the complex, underlying regulatory scheme that allocates the relative rights of brands and generics — and that balances safety against access — gets the balance correct or not is an open question, to be sure. But given the regulatory framework we have and the perceived need for some sort of safety controls around access to samples and for shared REMS plans, the law should at least work to do what it intends, without creating an opportunity for harmful manipulation. Yet it appears that the ambiguity of the current law has allowed some brand manufacturers to exploit these safety protections to limit competition.

As noted above, some are quite keen to make this an antitrust issue. But, as also noted, antitrust is a poor fit for handling such abuses.

First, antitrust law has an uneasy relationship with other regulatory schemes. Not least because of Trinko, it is a tough case to make that brand manufacturers are violating antitrust laws when they rely upon legal obligations under a safety program that is essentially designed to limit generic entry on safety grounds. The issue is all the more properly removed from the realm of antitrust enforcement given that the problem is actually one of regulatory failure, not market failure.

Second, antitrust law doesn’t impose a duty to deal with rivals except in very limited circumstances. In Trinko, for example, the Court rejected the invitation to extend a duty to deal to situations where an existing, voluntary economic relationship wasn’t terminated. By definition this is unlikely to be the case here where the alleged refusal to deal is what prevents the generic from entering the market in the first place. The logic behind Trinko (and a host of other cases that have limited competitors’ obligations to assist their rivals) was to restrict duty to deal cases to those rare circumstances where it reliably leads to long-term competitive harm — not where it amounts to a perfectly legitimate effort to compete without giving rivals a leg-up.

But antitrust is such a powerful tool and such a flexible “catch-all” regulation, that there are always efforts to thwart reasonable limits on its use. As severalofus at TOTM have written about at length in the past, former FTC Commissioner Rosch and former FTC Chairman Leibowitz were vocal proponents of using Section 5 of the FTC Act to circumvent sensible judicial limits on making out and winning antitrust claims, arguing that the limits were meant only for private plaintiffs — not (implicitly infallible) government enforcers. Although no one at the FTC has yet (publicly) suggested bringing a REMS case as a standalone Section 5 case, such a case would be consistent with the sorts of theories that animated past standalone Section 5 cases.

Again, this approach serves as an end-run around the reasonable judicial constraints that evolved as a result of judges actually examining the facts of individual cases over time, and is a misguided way of dealing with what is, after all, fundamentally a regulatory design problem.

The CREATES Act

Senator Lee’s bill, on the other hand, aims to solve the problem with a more straightforward approach by improving the existing regulatory mechanism and by adding a limited judicial remedy to incentivize compliance under the amended regulatory scheme. In summary:

The bill creates a cause of action for a refusal to deal only where plaintiff can prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that certain well-defined conditions are met.

For samples, if a drug is not covered by a REMS, or if the generic manufacturer is specifically authorized, then the generic can sue if it doesn’t receive sufficient quantities of samples on commercially reasonable terms. This is not a per se offense subject to outsized antitrust damages. Instead, the remedy is a limited injunction ensuring the sale of samples on commercially reasonable terms, reasonable attorneys’ fees, and a monetary fine limited to revenue earned from sale of the drug during the refusal period.

The bill also gives a brand manufacturer an affirmative defense if it can prove by a preponderance of the evidence that, regardless of its own refusal to supply them, samples were nevertheless available elsewhere on commercially reasonable terms, or where the brand manufacturer is unable to supply the samples because it does not actually produce or market the drug.

In order to deal with the REMS process problems, the bill creates similar rights with similar limitations when the license holders and generics cannot come to an agreement about a shared REMS on commercially reasonable terms within 120 days of first contact by an eligible developer.

The bill also explicitly limits brand manufacturers’ liability for claims “arising out of the failure of an [eligible generic manufacturer] to follow adequate safeguards,” thus removing one of the (perfectly legitimate) objections to the bill pressed by brand manufacturers.

The primary remedy is limited, injunctive relief to end the delay. And brands are protected from frivolous litigation by an affirmative defense under which they need only show that the product is available for purchase on reasonable terms elsewhere. Damages are similarly limited and are awarded only if a court finds that the brand manufacturer lacked a legitimate business justification for its conduct (which, under the drug safety regime, means essentially a reasonable belief that its own REMS plan would be violated by dealing with the generic entrant). And monetary damages do not include punitive damages.

Finally, the proposed bill completely avoids the question of whether antitrust laws are applicable, leaving that possibility open to determination by courts — as is appropriate. Moreover, by establishing even more clearly the comprehensive regulatory regime governing potential generic entrants’ access to dangerous drugs, the bill would, given the holding in Trinko, probably make application of antitrust laws here considerably less likely.

Ultimately Senator Lee’s bill is a well-thought-out and targeted fix to an imperfect regulation that seems to be facilitating anticompetitive conduct by a few bad actors. It does so without trampling on the courts’ well-established antitrust jurisprudence, and without imposing excessive cost or risk on the majority of brand manufacturers that behave perfectly appropriately under the law.

Earlier this week I testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade regarding several proposed FTC reform bills.

You can find my written testimony here. That testimony was drawn from a 100 page report, authored by Berin Szoka and me, entitled “The Federal Trade Commission: Restoring Congressional Oversight of the Second National Legislature — An Analysis of Proposed Legislation.” In the report we assess 9 of the 17 proposed reform bills in great detail, and offer a host of suggested amendments or additional reform proposals that, we believe, would help make the FTC more accountable to the courts. As I discuss in my oral remarks, that judicial oversight was part of the original plan for the Commission, and an essential part of ensuring that its immense discretion is effectively directed toward protecting consumers as technology and society evolve around it.

The report is “Report 2.0” of the FTC: Technology & Reform Project, which was convened by the International Center for Law & Economics and TechFreedom with an inaugural conference in 2013. Report 1.0 lays out some background on the FTC and its institutional dynamics, identifies the areas of possible reform at the agency, and suggests the key questions/issues each of them raises.

The text of my oral remarks follow, or, if you prefer, you can watch them here:

Chairman Burgess, Ranking Member Schakowsky, and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.

I’m Executive Director of the International Center for Law & Economics, a non-profit, non-partisan research center. I’m a former law professor, I used to work at Microsoft, and I had what a colleague once called the most illustrious FTC career ever — because, at approximately 2 weeks, it was probably the shortest.

I’m not typically one to advocate active engagement by Congress in anything (no offense). But the FTC is different.

Despite Congressional reforms, the FTC remains the closest thing we have to a second national legislature. Its jurisdiction covers nearly every company in America. Section 5, at its heart, runs just 20 words — leaving the Commission enormous discretion to make policy decisions that are essentially legislative.

The courts were supposed to keep the agency on course. But they haven’t. As Former Chairman Muris has written, “the agency has… traditionally been beyond judicial control.”

So it’s up to Congress to monitor the FTC’s processes, and tweak them when the FTC goes off course, which is inevitable.

This isn’t a condemnation of the FTC’s dedicated staff. Rather, this one way ratchet of ever-expanding discretion is simply the nature of the beast.

Yet too many people lionize the status quo. They see any effort to change the agency from the outside as an affront. It’s as if Congress was struck by a bolt of lightning in 1914 and the Perfect Platonic Agency sprang forth.

But in the real world, an agency with massive scope and discretion needs oversight — and feedback on how its legal doctrines evolve.

So why don’t the courts play that role? Companies essentially always settle with the FTC because of its exceptionally broad investigatory powers, its relatively weak standard for voting out complaints, and the fact that those decisions effectively aren’t reviewable in federal court.

Then there’s the fact that the FTC sits in judgment of its own prosecutions. So even if a company doesn’t settle and actually wins before the ALJ, FTC staff still wins 100% of the time before the full Commission.

Able though FTC staffers are, this can’t be from sheer skill alone.

Whether by design or by neglect, the FTC has become, as Chairman Muris again described it, “a largely unconstrained agency.”

Please understand: I say this out of love. To paraphrase Churchill, the FTC is the “worst form of regulatory agency — except for all the others.”

Eventually Congress had to course-correct the agency — to fix the disconnect and to apply its own pressure to refocus Section 5 doctrine.

So a heavily Democratic Congress pressured the Commission to adopt the Unfairness Policy Statement in 1980. The FTC promised to restrain itself by balancing the perceived benefits of its unfairness actions against the costs, and not acting when injury is insignificant or consumers could have reasonably avoided injury on their own. It is, inherently, an economic calculus.

But while the Commission pays lip service to the test, you’d be hard-pressed to identify how (or whether) it’s implemented it in practice. Meanwhile, the agency has essentially nullified the “materiality” requirement that it volunteered in its 1983 Deception Policy Statement.

Worst of all, Congress failed to anticipate that the FTC would resume exercising its vast discretion through what it now proudly calls its “common law of consent decrees” in data security cases.

Combined with a flurry of recommended best practices in reports that function as quasi-rulemakings, these settlements have enabled the FTC to circumvent both Congressional rulemaking reforms and meaningful oversight by the courts.

The FTC’s data security settlements aren’t an evolving common law. They’re a static statement of “reasonable” practices, repeated about 55 times over the past 14 years. At this point, it’s reasonable to assume that they apply to all circumstances — much like a rule (which is, more or less, the opposite of the common law).

Congressman Pompeo’s SHIELD Act would help curtail this practice, especially if amended to include consent orders and reports. It would also help focus the Commission on the actual elements of the Unfairness Policy Statement — which should be codified through Congressman Mullins’ SURE Act.

Significantly, only one data security case has actually come before an Article III court. The FTC trumpets Wyndham as an out-and-out win. But it wasn’t. In fact, the court agreed with Wyndham on the crucial point that prior consent orders were of little use in trying to understand the requirements of Section 5.

More recently the FTC suffered another rebuke. While it won its product design suit against Amazon, the Court rejected the Commission’s “fencing in” request to permanently hover over the company and micromanage practices that Amazon had already ended.

As the FTC grapples with such cutting-edge legal issues, it’s drifting away from the balance it promised Congress.

But Congress can’t fix these problems simply by telling the FTC to take its bedrock policy statements more seriously. Instead it must regularly reassess the process that’s allowed the FTC to avoid meaningful judicial scrutiny. The FTC requires significant course correction if its model is to move closer to a true “common law.”

Yesterday a federal district court in Washington state granted the FTC’s motion for summary judgment against Amazon in FTC v. Amazon — the case alleging unfair trade practices in Amazon’s design of the in-app purchases interface for apps available in its mobile app store. The headlines score the decision as a loss for Amazon, and the FTC, of course, claims victory. But the court also granted Amazon’s motion for partial summary judgment on a significant aspect of the case, and the Commission’s win may be decidedly pyrrhic.

While the district court (very wrongly, in my view) essentially followed the FTC in deciding that a well-designed user experience doesn’t count as a consumer benefit for assessing substantial harm under the FTC Act, it rejected the Commission’s request for a permanent injunction against Amazon. It also called into question the FTC’s calculation of monetary damages. These last two may be huge.

The FTC may have “won” the case, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent why it doesn’t want to take these cases to trial. First in Wyndham, and now in Amazon, courts have begun to chip away at the FTC’s expansive Section 5 discretion, even while handing the agency nominal victories.

The Good News

The FTC largely escapes judicial oversight in cases like these because its targets almost always settle (Amazon is a rare exception). These settlements — consent orders — typically impose detailed 20-year injunctions and give the FTC ongoing oversight of the companies’ conduct for the same period. The agency has wielded the threat of these consent orders as a powerful tool to micromanage tech companies, and it currently has at least one consent order in place with Twitter, Google, Apple, Facebook and several others.

The FTC prefers consent orders because they extend the commission’s authority with little judicial oversight, but they are too blunt an instrument for regulating a technology company. For the next 20 years, if the FTC decides that Google’s product design or billing practices don’t provide “express, informed consent,” the FTC could declare Google in violation of the new consent decree. The FTC could then impose huge penalties—tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars—without establishing that any consumer had actually been harmed.

Yesterday’s decision makes that outcome less likely. Companies will be much less willing to succumb to the FTC’s 20-year oversight demands if they know that courts may refuse the FTC’s injunction request and accept companies’ own, independent and market-driven efforts to address consumer concerns — without any special regulatory micromanagement.

In the same vein, while the court did find that Amazon was liable for repayment of unauthorized charges made without “express, informed authorization,” it also found the FTC’s monetary damages calculation questionable and asked for further briefing on the appropriate amount. If, as seems likely, it ultimately refuses to simply accept the FTC’s damages claims, that, too, will take some of the wind out of the FTC’s sails. Other companies have settled with the FTC and agreed to 20-year consent decrees in part, presumably, because of the threat of excessive damages if they litigate. That, too, is now less likely to happen.

Collectively, these holdings should help to force the FTC to better target its complaints to cases of still-ongoing and truly-harmful practices — the things the FTC Act was really meant to address, like actual fraud. Tech companies trying to navigate ever-changing competitive waters by carefully constructing their user interfaces and payment mechanisms (among other things) shouldn’t be treated the same way as fraudulent phishing scams.

The Bad News

The court’s other key holding is problematic, however. In essence, the court, like the FTC, seems to believe that regulators are better than companies’ product managers, designers and engineers at designing app-store user interfaces:

[A] clear and conspicuous disclaimer regarding in-app purchases and request for authorization on the front-end of a customer’s process could actually prove to… be more seamless than the somewhat unpredictable password prompt formulas rolled out by Amazon.

Never mind that Amazon has undoubtedly spent tremendous resources researching and designing the user experience in its app store. And never mind that — as Amazon is certainly aware — a consumer’s experience of a product is make-or-break in the cut-throat world of online commerce, advertising and search (just ask Jet).

Instead, for the court (and the FTC), the imagined mechanism of “affirmatively seeking a customer’s authorized consent to a charge” is all benefit and no cost. Whatever design decisions may have informed the way Amazon decided to seek consent are either irrelevant, or else the user-experience benefits they confer are negligible.

Amazon has built its entire business around the “1-click” concept — which consumers love — and implemented a host of notification and security processes hewing as much as possible to that design choice, but nevertheless taking account of the sorts of issues raised by in-app purchases. Moreover — and perhaps most significantly — it has implemented an innovative and comprehensive parental control regime (including the ability to turn off all in-app purchases) — Kindle Free Time — that arguably goes well beyond anything the FTC required in its Apple consent order.

Amazon is not abdicating its obligation to act fairly under the FTC Act and to ensure that users are protected from unauthorized charges. It’s just doing so in ways that also take account of the costs such protections may impose — particularly, in this case, on the majority of Amazon customers who didn’t and wouldn’t suffer such unauthorized charges.

Amazon began offering Kindle Free Time in 2012 as an innovative solution to a problem — children’s access to apps and in-app purchases — that affects only a small subset of Amazon’s customers. To dismiss that effort without considering that Amazon might have made a perfectly reasonable judgment that balanced consumer protection and product design disregards the cost-benefit balancing required by Section 5 of the FTC Act.

Moreover, the FTC Act imposes liability for harm only when they are not “reasonably avoidable.” Kindle Free Time is an outstanding example of an innovative mechanism that allows consumers at risk of unauthorized purchases by children to “reasonably avoid” harm. The court’s and the FTC’s disregard for it is inconsistent with the statute.

Conclusion

The court’s willingness to reinforce the FTC’s blackboard design “expertise” (such as it is) to second guess user-interface and other design decisions made by firms competing in real markets is unfortunate. But there’s a significant silver lining. By reining in the FTC’s discretion to go after these companies as if they were common fraudsters, the court has given consumers an important victory. After all, it is consumers who otherwise bear the costs (both directly and as a result of reduced risk-taking and innovation) of the FTC’s largely unchecked ability to extract excessive concessions from its enforcement targets.

I urge Truth on the Market readers to signal their preferences and help select the 2016 antitrust writing awards bestowed by the prestigious competition law and policy journal, Concurrences. (See here for the 2015 winners.)

Readers and a Steering Committee vote for their favorite articles among those nominated, which results in a short list of finalists (two per category). The Concurrences Board then votes for the award-winning articles from the shortlist. (See here for detailed rules.)

Among the nominees are three excellent papers written by former FTC Commissioner Joshua D. Wright (including one written with Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg) and one paper co-authored by Professor Thom Lambert and me (the four articles fall into three separate categories so you can vote for at least three of them):

All four of these articles break new ground in important areas of antitrust law and policy.

(Full disclosure: Wright and Ginsburg are professors at George Mason Law School. I am on the adjunct faculty at that fine institution and Wong-Ervin is Director of George Mason Law School’s Global Antitrust Institute.)

Josh Wright will doubtless be remembered for transforming how FTC polices competition. Between finally defining Unfair Methods of Competition (UMC), and his twelve dissents and multiple speeches about competition matters, he re-grounded competition policy in the error-cost framework: weighing not only costs against benefits, but also the likelihood of getting it wrong against the likelihood of getting it right.

Yet Wright may be remembered as much for what he started as what he finished: reforming the Commission’s Unfair and Deceptive Acts and Practices (UDAP) work. His consumer protection work is relatively slender: four dissents on high tech matters plus four relatively brief concurrences and one dissent on more traditional advertising substantiation cases. But together, these offer all the building blocks of an economic, error-cost-based approach to consumer protection. All that remains is for another FTC Commissioner to pick up where Wright left off.

Apple: Unfairness & Cost-Benefit Analysis

In January 2014, Wright issued a blistering, 17 page dissent from the Commission’s decision to bring, and settle, an enforcement action against Apple regarding the design of its app store. Wright dissented, not from the conclusion necessarily, but from the methodology by which the Commission arrived there. In essence, he argued for an error-cost approach to unfairness:

The Commission, under the rubric of “unfair acts and practices,” substitutes its own judgment for a private firm’s decisions as to how to design its product to satisfy as many users as possible, and requires a company to revamp an otherwise indisputably legitimate business practice. Given the apparent benefits to some consumers and to competition from Apple’s allegedly unfair practices, I believe the Commission should have conducted a much more robust analysis to determine whether the injury to this small group of consumers justifies the finding of unfairness and the imposition of a remedy.

…. although Apple’s allegedly unfair act or practice has harmed some consumers, I do not believe the Commission has demonstrated the injury is substantial. More importantly, any injury to consumers flowing from Apple’s choice of disclosure and billing practices is outweighed considerably by the benefits to competition and to consumers that flow from the same practice.

The majority insisted that the burden on consumers or Apple from its remedy “is de minimis,” and therefore “it was unnecessary for the Commission to undertake a study of how consumers react to different disclosures before issuing its complaint against Apple, as Commissioner Wright suggests.”

Wright responded: “Apple has apparently determined that most consumers do not want to experience excessive disclosures or to be inconvenienced by having to enter their passwords every time they make a purchase.” In essence, he argued, that the FTC should not presume to know better than Apple how to manage the subtle trade-offs between convenience and usability.

Wright was channeling Hayek’s famous quip: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” The last thing the FTC should be doing is designing digital products — even by hovering over Apple’s shoulder.

Footnote 85: Commissioner Wright agrees that Congress should consider legislation that would provide for consumer access to the information collected by data brokers. However, he does not believe that at this time there is enough evidence that the benefits to consumers of requiring data brokers to provide them with the ability to opt out of the sharing of all consumer information for marketing purposes outweighs the costs of imposing such a restriction. Finally… he believes that the Commission should engage in a rigorous study of consumer preferences sufficient to establish that consumers would likely benefit from such a portal prior to making such a recommendation.

Footnote 88: Commissioner Wright believes that in enacting statutes such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act, Congress undertook efforts to balance [costs and benefits]. In the instant case, Commissioner Wright is wary of extending FCRA-like coverage to other uses and categories of information without first performing a more robust balancing of the benefits and costs associated with imposing these requirements

A record that consists of a one-day workshop, its accompanying public comments, and the staff’s impressions of those proceedings, however well-intended, is neither likely to result in a representative sample of viewpoints nor to generate information sufficient to support legislative or policy recommendations.

His attack on the report’s methodology was blistering:

The Workshop Report does not perform any actual analysis whatsoever to ensure that, or even to give a rough sense of the likelihood that the benefits of the staff’s various proposals exceed their attendant costs. Instead, the Workshop Report merely relies upon its own assertions and various surveys that are not necessarily representative and, in any event, do not shed much light on actual consumer preferences as revealed by conduct in the marketplace…. I support the well-established Commission view that companies must maintain reasonable and appropriate security measures; that inquiry necessitates a cost-benefit analysis. The most significant drawback of the concepts of “security by design” and other privacy-related catchphrases is that they do not appear to contain any meaningful analytical content.

Ouch.

Nomi: Deception & Materiality Analysis

In April, Wright turned his analytical artillery from unfairness to deception, long the more uncontroversial half of UDAP. In a five-page dissent, Wright accused the Commission of essentially dispensing with the core limiting principle of the 1983 Deception Policy Statement: materiality. As Wright explained:

The materiality inquiry is critical because the Commission’s construct of “deception” uses materiality as an evidentiary proxy for consumer injury…. Deception causes consumer harm because it influences consumer behavior — that is, the deceptive statement is one that is not merely misleading in the abstract but one that causes consumers to make choices to their detriment that they would not have otherwise made. This essential link between materiality and consumer injury ensures the Commission’s deception authority is employed to deter only conduct that is likely to harm consumers and does not chill business conduct that makes consumers better off.

As in Apple, Wright did not argue that there might not be a role for the FTC; merely that the FTC had failed to justify bringing, let alone settling, an enforcement action without establishing that the key promise at issue — to provide in-store opt-out — was material.

The Chamber Speech: A Call for Economic Analysis

Perhaps it is because I am an economist who likes to deal with hard data, but when it comes to data and privacy regulation, the tendency to rely upon anecdote to motivate policy is a serious problem. Instead of developing a proper factual record that documents cognizable and actual harms, regulators can sometimes be tempted merely to explore anecdotal and other hypothetical examples and end up just offering speculations about the possibility of harm.

And on privacy in particular:

What I have seen instead is what appears to be a generalized apprehension about the collection and use of data — whether or not the data is actually personally identifiable or sensitive — along with a corresponding, and arguably crippling, fear about the possible misuse of such data. …. Any sensible approach to regulating the collection and use of data will take into account the risk of abuses that will harm consumers. But those risks must be weighed with as much precision as possible, as is the case with potential consumer benefits, in order to guide sensible policy for data collection and use. The appropriate calibration, of course, turns on our best estimates of how policy changes will actually impact consumers on the margin….

Wright concedes that the “vast majority of work that the Consumer Protection Bureau performs simply does not require significant economic analysis because they involve business practices that create substantial risk of consumer harm but little or nothing in the way of consumer benefits.” Yet he notes that the Internet has made the need for cost-benefit analysis far more acute, at least where conduct is ambiguous as its effects on consumers, as in Apple, to avoid “squelching innovation and depriving consumers of these benefits.”

The Wrightian Reform Agenda for UDAP Enforcement

Wright left all the building blocks his successor will need to bring “Wrightian” reform to how the Bureau of Consumer Protection works:

Wright’s successor should work to require economic analysis for consent decrees, as Wright proposed in his last major address as a Commissioner. BE might not to issue a statement at all in run-of-the-mill deception cases, but it should certainly have to say something about unfairness cases.

The FTC needs to systematically assess its enforcement process to understand the incentives causing companies to settle UDAP cases nearly every time — resulting in what Chairman Ramirez and Commissioner Brill frequently call the FTC’s “common law of consent decrees.”

As Wright says in his Nomi dissent “While the Act does not set forth a separate standard for accepting a consent decree, I believe that threshold should be at least as high as for bringing the initial complaint.” This point should be uncontroversial, yet the Commission has never addressed it. Wright’s successor (and the FTC) should, at a minimum, propose a standard for settling cases.

Just as Josh succeeded in getting the FTC to issue a UMC policy statement, his successor should re-assess the FTC’s two UDAP policy statements. Wright’s successor needs to make the case for finally codifying the DPS— and ensuring that the FTC stops bypassing materiality, as in Nomi.

The Commission should develop a rigorous methodology for each of the required elements of unfairness and deception to justify bringing cases (or making report recommendations). This will be a great deal harder than merely attacking the lack of such methodology in dissents.

The FTC has, in recent years, increasingly used reports to make de facto policy — by inventing what Wright calls, in his Chamber speech, “slogans and catchphrases” like “privacy by design,” and then using them as boilerplate requirements for consent decrees; by pressuring companies into adopting the FTC’s best practices; by calling for legislation; and so on. At a minimum, these reports must be grounded in careful economic analysis.

The Commission should apply far greater rigor in setting standards for substantiating claims about health benefits. In two dissents, Genelink et al and HCG Platinum, Wright demolished arguments for a clear, bright line requiring two randomized clinical trials, and made the case for “a more flexible substantiation requirement” instead.

Conclusion: Big Shoes to Fill

It’s a testament to Wright’s analytical clarity that he managed to say so much about consumer protection in so few words. That his UDAP work has received so little attention, relative to his competition work, says just as much about the far greater need for someone to do for consumer protection what Wright did for competition enforcement and policy at the FTC.

Wright’s successor, if she’s going to finish what Wright started, will need something approaching Wright’s sheer intellect, his deep internalization of the error-costs approach, and his knack for brokering bipartisan compromise around major issues — plus the kind of passion for UDAP matters Wright had for competition matters. And, of course, that person needs to be able to continue his legacy on competition matters…

Compared to the difficulty of finding that person, actually implementing these reforms may be the easy part.

by Timothy J. Muris, University Foundation Professor of Law, George Mason University and former Chairman of the FTC

As the premier Antitrust scholar of his generation, Josh Wright’s appointment to the Federal Trade Commission promised to be noteworthy. He did not disappoint, having one of the most important and memorable tenures of any non-Chair over the 40 years that I have followed the agency closely.

In numerous speeches, dissents, and a variety of other statements on matters before the Commission, Josh articulated important messages for Antitrust. In particular, his call for evidence-based decisions has been a welcome reminder of that crucial element of sound policy. Moreover, he has continued to recognize that most arguments over the Chicago school are stale, reflecting 20th century battles long decided.

Finally, a few words about one area of disagreement, the section 5 statement that the Commission issued shortly before Commissioner Wright’s departure. Having witnessed firsthand the FTC’s overreaching in the 1970s, in both Antitrust and Consumer Protection, I have long thought that section 5 should be read coextensive with the Sherman and Clayton Acts. There is no need, especially with the maturity of the Antitrust Laws represented by the many 21st-century Supreme Court decisions, for separate, more expensive enforcement under section 5. Even here, however, Josh Wright’s numerous speeches and articles on the subject have demonstrated the continued relevance and importance of potential FTC overreaching.

I congratulate Commissioner Wright on his tenure, and look forward to decades to come of contributions on the issues facing the Antitrust and FTC communities.

Alden Abbott and I recently co-authored an article, forthcoming in the Journal of Competition Law and Economics, in which we examined the degree to which the Supreme Court and the federal enforcement agencies have recognized the inherent limits of antitrust law. We concluded that the Roberts Court has admirably acknowledged those limits and has for the most part crafted liability rules that will maximize antitrust’s social value. The enforcement agencies, by contrast, have largely ignored antitrust’s intrinsic limits. In a number of areas, they have sought to expand antitrust’s reach in ways likely to reduce consumer welfare.

The bright spot in federal antitrust enforcement in the last few years has been Josh Wright. Time and again, he has bucked the antitrust establishment, reminding the mandarins that their goal should not be to stop every instance of anticompetitive behavior but instead to optimize antitrust by minimizing the sum of error costs (from both false negatives and false positives) and decision costs. As Judge Easterbrook famously explained, and as Josh Wright has emphasized more than anyone I know, inevitable mistakes (error costs) and heavy information requirements (decision costs) constrain what antitrust can do. Every liability rule, every defense, every immunity doctrine should be crafted with those limits in mind.

Josh will no doubt be remembered, and justifiably so, for spearheading the effort to provide guidance on how the Federal Trade Commission will exercise its amorphous authority to police “unfair methods of competition.” Severalothers have lauded Josh’s fine contribution on that matter (ashaveI), so I won’t gild that lily here. Instead, let me briefly highlight two other areas in which Josh has properly pushed for a recognition of antitrust’s inherent limits.

That’s exactly what Josh Wright has done. In an early post-LeeginRPM order predating Josh’s tenure, the FTC endorsed a liability rule that placed an inappropriately heavy burden on RPM defendants. Josh later laid the groundwork for correcting that mistake, advocating a much more evidence-based (and defendant-friendly) RPM rule. In the McWane case, the Commission condemned an exclusive dealing arrangement that had been in place for long enough to cause anticompetitive harm but hadn’t done so. Josh rightly called out the majority for elevating theoretical harm over actual market evidence. (Adopting a highly deferential stance, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the Commission majority, but Josh was right to criticize the majority’s implicit hostility toward exclusive dealing.) In settling the Graco case, the Commission again went beyond the evidence, requiring the defendant to cease exclusive dealing and to stop giving loyalty rebates even though there was no evidence that either sort of vertical restraint contributed to the anticompetitive harm giving rise to the action at issue. Josh rightly took the Commission to task for reflexively treating vertical restraints as suspect when they’re usually procompetitive and had an obvious procompetitive justification (avoidance of interbrand free-riding) in the case at hand.

Horizontal Mergers

Horizontal mergers, like vertical restraints, are competitive mixed bags. Any particular merger of competitors may impose some consumer harm by reducing the competition facing the merged firm. The same merger, though, may provide some consumer benefit by lowering the merged firm’s costs and thereby allowing it to compete more vigorously (most notably, by lowering its prices). A merger policy committed to minimizing the consumer welfare losses from unwarranted condemnations of net beneficial mergers and improper acquittals of net harmful ones would afford equal treatment to claims of anticompetitive harm and procompetitive benefit, requiring each to be established by the same quantum of proof.

The federal enforcement agencies’ new Horizontal Merger Guidelines, however, may put a thumb on the scale, tilting the balance toward a finding of anticompetitive harm. The Guidelines make it easier for the agencies to establish likely anticompetitive harm. Enforcers may now avoid defining a market if they point to adverse unilateral effects using the gross upward pricing pressure index (GUPPI). The merging parties, by contrast, bear a heavy burden when they seek to show that their contemplated merger will occasion efficiencies. They must: (1) prove that any claimed efficiencies are “merger-specific” (i.e., incapable of being achieved absent the merger); (2) “substantiate” asserted efficiencies; and (3) show that such efficiencies will result in the very markets in which the agencies have established likely anticompetitive effects.

In an important dissent (Ardagh), Josh observed that the agencies’ practice has evolved such that there are asymmetric burdens in establishing competitive effects, and he cautioned that this asymmetry will enhance error costs. (Geoff praised that dissent here.) In another dissent (Family Dollar/Dollar Tree), Josh acknowledged some potential problems with the promising but empirically unverified GUPPI, and he wisely advocated the creation of safe harbors for mergers generating very low GUPPI scores. (I praised that dissent here.)

I could go on and on, but these examples suffice to illustrate what has been, in my opinion, Josh’s most important contribution as an FTC commissioner: his constant effort to strengthen antitrust’s effectiveness by acknowledging its inevitable and inexorable limits. Coming on the heels of the FTC’s and DOJ’s rejection of the Section 2 Report—a document that was highly attuned to antitrust’s limits—Josh was just what antitrust needed.

by Terry Calvani, of counsel at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP and formerly Acting-Chairman and Commissioner of the FTC, & Jan Rybnicek, associate at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP, and former attorney advisor to Commissioner Joshua Wright.

When a presidential appointee leaves office, it is quite common to consider the person’s legacy to their department or agency. We are delighted to participate in this symposium and to reflect on the contributions of our friend, Commissioner Joshua Wright, to the Federal Trade Commission.

To be sure, Commissioner Wright’s time at the FTC has been marked by no shortage of important votes, statements, speeches, testimony, and policy proposals that individually have had a positive and meaningful impact on the Commission and on antitrust policy more generally. In our view, however, the hallmark of Commissioner Wright’s most recent stint at the Commission is found in two overarching principles that have guided his approach to pursuing the agency’s mission of promoting consumer welfare and that, as a result, will be important considerations for those entrusted with selecting his replacement as well as future commissioners. We see those overarching principles as: (1) the rigorous application and ceaseless promotion of economics within the Commission and (2) the indefatigable participation in the marketplace of ideas.

A key characteristic of Commissioner Wright’s tenure at the FTC has been his insistence on rigorously applying modern economic principles to US competition law enforcement. Given that competition law is in reality applied industrial organization economics, well-grounded economic analysis is essential to the Commission’s discharge of its competition law enforcement functions. One would be concerned if there was not a trained surgeon in the operating room. Similarly, we are better served by a FTC that includes a professional economist among the ranks of its Commissioners. Indeed, no one has trumpeted the importance of incorporating modern economics into antitrust policy more than Commissioner Wright. Over the last two and a half years, Commissioner Wright has used his platform at the agency both to identify instances where the Commission’s economic analysis failed to live up to its potential and to praise those many occasions on which the talented attorneys and economists worked together to promote economically sound policies and enforcement decisions that the Commission adopted. This increased scrutiny and engagement on the economic analysis that underlies the Commission’s work necessarily has focused the agency’s attention on these core issues and created an environment where economics is more regularly and rigorously incorporated into enforcement decisions. We think that this clearly has been to the benefit of the agency and consumers.

As an independent and expert bureau within the FTC, the Bureau of Economics (“BE”) plays a critical role in the agency’s enforcement decisions. However, the role of BE is not a substitute to the presence of a professional economist Commissioner who can ensure that the Commission considers, addresses, and hopefully more often than not, fully incorporates modern economic analysis into its decision-making at the highest level. The importance of including an economist among the Commissioners has become only more obvious in light of the recent report of the FTC Inspector General that evaluated the effectiveness of BE. There, the Inspector General discussed the organization and use of economists within the existing FTC structure and made several recommendations for areas for improvement to help optimize BE’s effectiveness. Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the report, Commissioner Wright issued a statement that included his own recommendations for institutional changes that might elevate the role of BE. As anyone who has had the privilege of working at the Commission or regularly practices before it knows, the agency is dominated by it attorneys, often at the expense of BE. In such an environment, it is even more critical to have at least one economist as a member of the Commission if we truly are, as we should be, committed to making economics a prominent part of the agency’s work.

Whether this important contribution by Commissioner Wright will be a lasting legacy will depend entirely on whether future presidents, together with the advice and consent of the Senate, will follow the lead of Presidents Reagan and Obama by continuing to appoint economists to the college of commissioners. Certainly, Commissioner Wright’s service demonstrates its value.

A second characteristic of Commissioner Wright’s tenure at the FTC is his willingness to engage frequently in the marketplace of ideas in order to advance antitrust policy. Commissioner Wright is a prolific writer and is well-known for not being shy in expressing his positions in any forum. Over the course of his tenure at the FTC, Commissioner Wright issued 16 dissents, delivered over 25 speeches, testified before Congress on three occasions, and participated in countless more symposia, roundtables, and interviews. Frequently writing in dissent or arguing for fundamental changes to antitrust policy, Commissioner Wright’s opinions and speeches merit a close read by any serious practitioner. Whether it was Ardagh/Saint-Gobain (asymmetrical nature of competitive harm and efficiencies analysis at the FTC), Nielsen/Arbitron (limits of antitrust in double potential competition cases lacking economic evidence), Holcim/LaFarge (structural presumption is unsupported by modern economics), his torrentofwritingsthatculminated in a historic statement on Section 5, or any number of his other statements or speeches, Commissioner Wright’s willingness to express his views and have them debated in the public forum has contributed significantly to the development of antitrust law.

We hasten to note Justice Ginsburg’s observation that powerful dissents force the majority to be more rigorous in their own analyses and ultimately produce better decisions. Donning his professor’s mortar board, Commissioner Wright was not reticent about grading the decisions of the majority. The discipline this brings to the Commission’s decisions should be welcomed by all. Borrowing from former Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, such dissents can provide a valuable critique of the prevailing conventional wisdom and discern a better path going forward.

Lastly, we would be remiss not to mention that although Commissioner Wright took an evidenced-based approach to antitrust law and policy grounded in modern economics seriously, he discharged his duties with both humility and humor. He was not one to stand on ceremony and honorifics and was often simply “Josh” to both the staff and those who appeared before the agency. He employed an open-door policy, welcoming staff to discuss and debate matters without ceremony. He made it a priority to nurture the development and careers of his advisors and interns. The simple fact is that as an academic he enjoyed serious discussion and was more than willing to consider the merits of “the other side.” Indeed, Commissioner Wright found the crucible of testing the analysis fun and sought to make it fun for those on his staff.

Commissioner Wright’s service on the FTC is yet another example of how the “revolving door” continues to replenish the intellectual stock of US agencies. Given that the “dismal science” does not respect national boundaries, one might wonder why economic analysis was employed both earlier and more rigorously in the United States than elsewhere. Are not there quality economists around the globe? We suggest that the “revolving door” bringing, as it does, new recruits from the academy and elsewhere fosters agency openness to new ideas. It continuously fertilizes the advancement and development of sound economic competition policy and enforcement. Not surprisingly, agencies that take from the cradle and give to the grave are less likely to benefit.

by Robert H. Lande, Venable Professor of Law, University of Baltimore School of Law

There’s an old saying, “It’s better to light a single bipartisan candle than to curse the darkness caused by your opponents.” This might not be the way most people articulate this proverb, but in Washington D. C. anyone who, like Commissioner Joshua Wright, puts so much effort into finding, developing, and promoting bipartisan agreement is a rarity indeed.

Commissioner Wright’s final accomplishment at the Commission was the agency’s Section 5 Policy Statement. It had been a high priority of his for years. In light of the fact that the Commission had gone a century without issuing anything describing its central competition mission and the wide divergence of views at the Commission on the underlying issues, many of us thought his task impossible. But he succeeded! It wasn’t the statement he wanted, of course, but his preferred statement was opposed by so many (including me) that agreement on a detailed document was not feasible. He nevertheless secured a compromise that perhaps will be the building block for a future, more detailed and even more useful document. By persevering and stressing the areas where the Commissioners agreed, he forged a historic bipartisan consensus.

Another example of Commissioner Wright’s approach is a policy recommendation he and his frequent co-author, Judge Douglas Ginsburg, developed, wrote and are promoting together with two extraordinarily unlikely co-authors: Bert Foer, the founder and past President of the American Antitrust Institute, and me, a Director of this organization. You might wonder what the four of us possibly could agree upon?

Wright & Ginsburg sent a proposed set of recommendations to the US Sentencing Commission calling upon it to make a large number of changes involving criminal antitrust penalties. At the same time Foer & Lande recommended that the Sentencing Commission implement an almost opposite list of policy changes. In fact, the dueling recommendations agreed on only one issue: Both wanted to ban corporations convicted of price fixing from hiring their cartel’s convicted employees after they were released from prison. Stressing their agreement, this unlikely quartet co-authored a piece advocating this policy option. We of course hope and believe that the politically diverse names on the recommendation will cause it to have a much greater impact than separate recommendations by either team would have had.

Because he always pushed as hard as possible for his preferred positions, he of course didn’t get everything he wanted. But he persevered and in this way forged and secured whatever agreements he could. In today’s Washington D.C. these candles are noteworthy accomplishments. Kudos to Commissioner Wright!